June 28, 2004
Knoppix to the rescue
I moved the broken shell of my computer to Coptix on Saturday, hoping there to restore it to full functionality under the more benevolent if esoteric spirits of Gentoo. I learned several important things, some of which are good, some of which are hard, some of which are kind of there, and some of which are as of yet indeterminate. First, I learned that when you use a compressed air can for more than a few seconds it gets really cold due to the expansion. Okay.
I also learned that the problem with my computer may not actually be in the drives after all, It seems that my motherboard, which has served me faithfully for about two years, did not survive the destruction of the power supply last spring as I had hoped. You see, the computer only detects drives when it feels like it. Sometimes they're there. Sometimes they aren't. And there doesn't seem to be any pattern to this. And I know for sure that it isn't the drives because I just put in two brand new ones and they only show up some of the time. o, I'm probably replacing the bad boy today. Great. Just what I needed.
I also learned that booting straight from an SATA drive under Linux isn't all that much easier than it is in Windows, which is to say it's a freaking pain. Regular IDE, sure, we've got that in spades. But the new hotness? Nah, you've got to compile that into the kernel yourself. How exactly you're supposed to do this without access to the Internet or a hard drive because you can't install an OS is kind of beyond me.
That, my friend, is where Knoppix comes in. It's what I'm using right now. Knoppix is a pre-compiled OS-on-a-CD that you can use by simply popping it in your computer and booting up. It's got a nice KDE interface with all the programs you need, and if I'm not mistaken, it also has the necessary drivers so I can export them across the network and have someone else compile and burn them for me later today. Hopefully. If the guys in the office are feeling particularly nice. In any case, I'm online - kind of - again, and I just want to say that the ability to do this without any drive on the computer actually working is pretty damned cool. I still need to get another motherboard, but hey, it's only money, right?
In other news, I'm off this week. I stopped work on Friday so I could spend this week getting my computer back together and getting my life out of 4103 St. Elmo Ave and into my car for a nice, leisurely trek up the Blue Ridge on Saturday. So I've got the time to mess with this, as much of a pain as it is.
